Bücher veröffentlicht von Finishing Line Press

Reading Masked/Unmuted by Jean Hackett is to experience the world as a poet living moment to moment, in today's chaotic political/pandemic world. With a naturalist's sensibility; she captures the interplay of daily coping and a larger concern for the planet. A singular eye that can speak to water still spins down the drain clockwise and leap to a car hood, pollen and backyard mockingbirds in a single poem. In this collection, nature is a character involving itself in a lover's breakup and white privilege. Masked/Unmasked deliberates the continual adaptation to circumstance. She describes COVID as: the plague smiled and waited to present itself in new clothes. Life on Zoom is described as: we've memorized the décor of our shared spaces. The poet's masterful use of alliteration brings an unexpected music to this work. A must read for readers looking for fresh and brilliant language and a deeper redemption. And as so aptly stated by the poet, Big decisions must fall to higher powers. Jesus take the bulldozer wheel!-Lisha Adela García, author of Blood Rivers and A Rope of LunaIt is a pleasure to read Jean Hackett's collection of poems, Masked/Unmuted. The rhythm and flow of language whispers and sometimes shouts the reader through waxing and waning demands of life during a pandemic. The poetry honors loss and life, sacred and mundane, fear and hope. It connects us to our relationships to the small world of our confinement, with the magnitude of the global, the universal, to one another, and to our own hearts. Each poem compels the reader to grasp the next. The poems are evocative, thoughtful, with touches of humor that bring a smile and with emotion that shapes a tear. Mary Oliver writes in A Poetry Handbook, "...A poem...is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind." I applaud the "love affair" of this poetry.-Dr. Patricia Keoughan, Ocotillo Review, Enigmatist, Di-verse-city, Texas Poetry Calendar, and Through Layered Limestone

Not only about knitting, this series of 21 "prayers" to imaginary saints contains wry, often humorous meditations about memory, friendship, contemporary life, love, and the obstacles that present themselves when creating objects of beauty.

Only When the Light's Just Right by Paul R. Scollan is a glimpse at the human condition-aging, relationships, and daily life. The reader sees the "usual route through factory streets" and then "shuffling a block through brick-red leaves scattered over sidewalks." Scollan's poems hold us close to the moments lived in a life's journey.-Leah Huete de Maines, Poet-in-Residence Emerita at Northern Kentucky University

Bing Hua, "The Queen of Love Poetry", award-winning poet. Bing Hua 's poems center on lauding the love of life and the beauty of affection. With remarkable poetic lines, she has created vital and extraordinary artistic realms. Thus, in her way of sentiment, language, and rhythm, she has freely and fully instilled the female's tender, warm, and affectionate feelings into the deep souls of her readers. She meticulously cultivates fragrant roses by a creek, in a garden, or even in the field of her whole life. In this, she also cultivates beauty. She integrates her whole heart into nature to directly communicate with nature and submerge herself in the orderly and unorderly boundless firmament. Her poetry is indeed commendable. It is a very unique and culture-rich life experience and mental enlightenment.

When food is rich, it is saturated-in butter or in sugar, but also in nutrients. R. Stempel's Before the Desire to Eat is rich in all of these ways: lush with an edge, charged with verdant growth, flourishing "under a petri dish sky". Snort fabric softener with Stempel & get high on bananas that taste like nail polish as they delight in alliteration and repetition, in the exchange between domesticity, microbiology, and the body. "Rot won't shatter," Stempel writes, "rot / does shield." These poems feel good in the mouth.-S. Brook Corfman, author of My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites (Fordham University Press, 2020) and Luxury, Blue Lace (Autumn House, 2019)Arguably, you will fall in love with these poems, beauties all, as their author declares: Arguably I'm in love / with all my friends. It feels sneaky // when I, arms widened, perform / palatial, baiting // my beauties under guise / of something less carnal. In this farm-to-table recipe book for dismantling the patriarchy and the matriarchy, R. Stempel is an impeccable guide to what is edible, what is permissible and what is impermissibly alluring. Early on we learn "there are too many bird metaphors." Stempel's complex verse makes us believe and also take with a grain of salt, plus vinegar and some other condiments all the voices in BEFORE THE DESIRE TO EAT. Emily Dickinson's Angle-Worm-eating Bird would feel right at home coming down the Walk of this book. It's got raw fellows, convenient Dew, Velvet Heads, cautious Crumb and plenty of eros.-Judith Baumel, author of The Weight of Numbers (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 1988), Now (University of Miami Press, 1996), The Kangaroo Girl (GenPop Books, 2011), and Passeggiate (Arrowsmith Press, 2019)These poems have mukbang energy: they're gross, lusty, indulgent, and hard to unsee. And like those videos, Stempel's poems are a new kind of art. In their crooked clarity, a pomegranate has a "crowned nipple-stem" concealing a "cellulose jungle-gym" and bananas taste like nail polish. Elsewhere on the menu: bone broth, gummy worms, kombucha, vinegar, pork shoulder, gefilte fish, black grapes, a six-hour goulash, and-why not-a talking pig caked in flour. Stempel's poems feel mid-theft, as if the reader were walking in on the poet with one hand in the cookie jar. It's no accident: these poems announce themselves as "neither fit nor proper"-they take place inside that moment before the desire to eat when everything is both edible and indelible.-Jan-Henry Gray, author of Documents (Winner of the BOA Editions' 2018 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize) and the chapbook, Selected Emails (speCt! Books)

In this chapbook Glenis honors Harriet Tubman (conductor of the underground railroad), Harriet E. Wilson (first black woman novelist), Harriet Jacobs (abolitionist), Harriet Powers (quilter), Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer and Simbi (water spirit). "The Three Harriets & Others reimagine the agency and ancestral urgency of Black foremothers. Glenis Redmond raises her/their voices with fierce unflinching and unapologetic poetics. These poems offer an ancient, unshackled breath that allows them to "Spill ink like night clouds that clot what your soul cannot hold."

Sore Points is the story told through poems of an Aunt and her nephew. They are different people but they have a strong connection. The book tells both their stories and shows their connection-which is not always easy. It can make them both sore. Two stories tell two stories-but also one story.

Love, Loss, Death and BeautyIn Re-Membering, subtitled "In the midst of life we are in death." from Book of Common Prayer, 1662, Burial of the Dead, Alice Hildebrand explores the complicated relationships within families, especially between mother and daughter, brought into sharp relief by illness and death. Her poems start with the description of the impact of a mother's alcoholism on a child as seen through that child's yearning for greater connection, and move through the life cycle to finally letting go of that wish. In it we see the sadness of the child turn into the compassion and acceptance of maturity, and an exploration of what it means for a daughter to also be a mother herself. Throughout, the poems celebrate the richness of the natural world in which human lives unfold, and express the persistent presence of endings, of loss and death as an integral part of life. The author locates herself and us within the stream of her family's history, and contextualizes that stream within the larger motions of the universe.

Poems from a pandemic year, including "Letter," winner of Third Wednesday Magazine's 50/50 Poetry Contest. Inspired by daily walks in the prairie and woods, and tracking the progress of the seasons and the anxieties and unexpected wonders of a challenging year, this collection moves from darkness to light and offers hope in a difficult time.

We are the overcast, those living beneath the clouds, dealing with loss but somehow still loving the earth. Some of us have been "blessed"; some suffer more than their share. We go from innocence to experience, then back to innocence-are we ever wise? Or do we just reach a point where we either accept or do not accept our lot? These poems explore our relationship with nature and our bewilderment at the losses we undergo. The speaker wonders what the natural world has to tell us and whether we could even understand what it might say. Even with all this struggle, the world holds such beauty. We "sing in [our] chains like the sea." There is no heaven like the song of the overcast.

When culling through poems for chapbook material, the author settled on her deep-seated preoccupation with the elusive nature of time and memory. And so too does the narrator in Quicksilver, a female who functions in the present as "recall's rough teeth, its flecks of / so-what" nip unexpectedly. Gossamer-thin recollections enhance and complicate the present as her departed loved ones reappear, uninvited. As she leans in with wonder and wariness, the past clasps her ankle.

Burning Barrel explores the beauty and danger of nature. It interrogates home - why we leave and come back. "Price Chopper, Alex Bay" was nominated for the 2020/2021 Best Of The Net Anthology.¿

In Junk Drawer, Corey D. Cook brings the poet's eye and sensibilities to artifacts and occasions both common and uncommon, such as a fishing trip, a mother's grief, the Donald Hall estate sale, a splitting wedge and the drawer filled with the detritus of accumulated living: "His and hers phone chargers / in an inexplicable knot, / bound together / like a solemn vow." Through the perceptive lens of Cook's poetry, his gift for metaphor, we are able to say with new and deeper understanding: I know where we are, I have been here before.-Robert Demaree, author of Other Ladders and After Labor Day (Beech River Books)Corey D. Cook's poetry is accessible, and that is not a bad thing. Indeed, we have privileged access to his economy of words-that like a quick cut from a stiletto, makes us stop short and catch our collective breath. His poems incorporate it all, from a dead cow, manure on Donald Hall's estate in New Hampshire, to an image of a gone-to-seed snowman as an omen of depression. The banal is profound in Cook's work-he is a high holy poet of the extraordinary in the ordinary.-Doug Holder, founder of Ibbetson Street Press and Creative Writing faculty at Endicott CollegeAs I read Corey D. Cook's commanding new poetry collection, Junk Drawer, I am reminded of that particular pain when accidentally stepping on one of my children's Legos in the middle of the night; the hopping, followed by the cussing. Junk Drawer, similarly, delves into the unrelenting push and pull of family life, counseling sessions and those things left unsaid, of pots boiling over, and small children sneaking into their parents' bed like in the poem, "Splitting Wedge"-He woke early and slipped out / of bed for Sesame Street / and the letter of the day / leaving behind the "V" our bodies made / our heels barely touching. And in the poem, "Junk Drawer (IV)," we discover-O's report card / from swim lessons / the one skill unchecked: / survival float. I strongly recommend Cook's Junk Drawer, a glorious read.-Carolynn Kingyens, author of Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound (Kelsay Books)

In this impressive first collection, Kristina Hakanson gives us-in both free verse and lyric prose forms-poems of considerable range and power, most poignantly those about her beloved father's terminal illness. In one, she makes this striking and quintessentially human confession: "I'm about to say goodbye / to my bedridden father, / the first man I loved, / the only one whose heart I refuse to break, / ashamed that I ever did, / if I ever did. / I'm sure I did." Hakanson's work evokes a fraught yet wrenchingly beautiful world-a "heaven's underside" in which "Each sorrow converted to ice / grows warm in the palm of your hand."-Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate EmeritaBoth elegiac and celebratory, these poems derive their strength from the real world around us: wooden spoons, egg-beaters, a coffee cup, the teeth of a harrow-touched here and there by an element of the surreal (a wolf in a cello). I admire their clean language and plainspoken balance, from the mundane to the eternal-their realization that "Whole lives are lived on the dirt/ which long ago came from the stars".-Joseph Millar

Born of spiritual crisis, I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember is a collection of poems that wrestle with the complexities of faith through the interrogation and reinterpretation of biblical stories. With an unflinching eye, these poems focus on characters who struggle with their place in the grand narrative: Isaac with the trauma of his near sacrifice, Ezekiel with the staggering costs of his prophecies, Peter with the guilt of his betrayal, and John with the despair of his exile. In doing so, they ask hard questions about what it means to seek the divine in the shadow of a fallen world.

Sagebrush Songs arises from the northern New Mexico landscape, remote and unique. The headwaters of the Rio Grande and one of its major tributaries, the Rio Chama, originate in the southern Rocky Mountains. A high desert plateau stretches between the Tusas and Sangre de Christo ranges in this mountain system. The Rio Grande rift, a major continental rift zone, runs through the plateau. As a transitional zone between alpine forests and shortgrass prairie, the sagebrush mesa supports diverse animal and plant communities. A scenic roadway around Wheeler Peak, the highest point in New Mexico, defines the Enchanted Circle a few miles north of the Taos Pueblo. Pueblo Peak, popularly known as Taos Mountain, is revered because the Taos Pueblo's water supply originates there, and because of the mountain's striking contour in the Sangre de Christo range.The ancient Chinese understanding of Tao sees mountains and rivers as expressions of yin and yang, the energies that animate fundamental creative material. Tao, or "the Way," contemplates mountains and rivers in terms of processes that continually generate and regenerate all things as they emerge from and recede into empty absence. Classical Chinese poetry meditates on such landscape features and their empty spaces. Learning to be present in northern New Mexico enables me to understand why this is so. Sagebrush Songs is my meditation on its mountains and rivers as manifestations of the Way of all things.

The poems in Making Silent Stones Sing by Susan Cummins Miller, award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, capture a geoscientist's contemplation of, discoveries in, and wisdom gained from the changing landscape of her life and history. Individual poems explore universal themes: wonder, joy, loss, love, Deep Time, and the healing power and renewal to be found in the solitude and silence of the desert West.

In Just Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes, poet and novelist Michele Herman explores a variety of timeless human predicaments - adolescent lust, overprotective parents, dementia, gender confusion and more - by imagining her way into the actual lives of eight familiar nursery-rhyme characters. Many authors have taken fictional or mythological characters and brought them into our contemporary world, but these eight story-poems accomplish something more unusual by roaming around in Mr. and Mrs. Sprat's house to find out what ails them, following little Bo Beep out to the Welsh pasture to learn how she lost track of her sheep, conjuring up a twin brother for Little Miss Muffet, and much more.

Monotonies of the Wildlife is a complex, surreal dialogue with the natural world: its joys, pleasures, and deepest desires whittled down to a few solitary moments of singular yet deeply interconnected animals and selves. Monotonies engages in heartfelt conversations with loss, not only of those with whom we've connected, loved, cherished, but those whom we've failed to do so. Erickson's poem "Player Piano" was long-listed for the Wildfire Words International prize in poetry and is featured in the Transformations Anthology. In its surreal environments, one loses the ability to distinguish between the self and the myriad other selves by which we are surrounded.